UUUUFFFFF!!!! It took six long monthes but it is running. Yesterday, our
team finished a very long work on preparing a new class for
students/workers in our University. 80% of its software base comes from
cooker. Mostly what we had during the start of the transfer to the new
lib policy. We couldn't wait the whole thing so we made some hell of a
mix here...
This new system also reflects a quality change in our service. Yeap
people, here we started a 100% office system. Before these stations were
mostly used for web browsing and Internet apps, with a small flavour of
document processing. Right now we stopped the Internet bloating and are
giving more preferences to a more wholescale system. A system with
Internet, office, scientific apps, a few games :) and with capacity to
work with multimedia and 3D accelerators.
Some of the main characteristics of the system:
Kernel 2.4.0
X 4.0.1
Nearly 80% based on Mandrake Cooker
Mozilla as the main browser
Several Internet-related apps
StarOffice 5.2 as the main office app.
Carrying nearly all wm's that exist in Mandrake but with a special
preference for KDE2.
Lots of programs to ease user's lives: archivers, file managers and many
other stuff.
Supports connections to SMB and Novell Netware servers
User's authentication carried through NIS+ (LDAP will also be supported
soon). Home directories are mounted through NFSv3 (we are studying the
possibility to connect them to Netware)
Some scientific applications, specially in the field of Maths. Cluster
support (PVM + LAM-MPI. Mosix soon)
Netscape only goes in its Navigator form. Due to eternal and
ever-growing problems with NIS+ and authentication in general. Soon it
may be discontinued.
The stuff is working and it is working quite stable in terms of the
system itself. Users had some sort of a shock in the morning by seeing
the first computers with this thing. However, only one made a huge
scandal (well, we DID ask to not use Netscape anymore). The stuff hanged
and she started to bash the "experimentators". Well, we cooled her down.
The sysadmin's Kerberos (guess who? warf! warf!) was immediately sent
and showed she was TREMENDOUSLY wrong. On the rest a few user's oops due
to the new interface, two three glitches, and a real problem with
localization.
Localization on Mandrake is still a Hot Hell in Flames. We are in
Russia. But we don't have only Russians here. In fact I'm in Tatarstan,
which is one of the states that has recently added its locale to the
Linux herd. And worse, we have nearly 10% of the population being
foreigners. Ranging from Arabs to westerners, with some spice from such
places like Mongolia, Vietnam or Sry Lanka. And to help, we have here a
lot of University workers needing such things like Japanese or Chinese.
Trying to satisfy this demand, under the conditions Mandrake produces
its localization, is a HELL. Anyway, thanks God that Linux is flexible
enough to find a middle solution. But I think it is not enough.
Well, in more concrete terms. What is this Hell all about? First the
problem of how to localize the locales. There are several main problems
in our work: KDE and other wm's, Gnome/GTK, Qt-"only", X, StarOffice and
console/terminal apps. Each one of these elements have problems. I don't
wanna say that we should find some sort of unification. In general, I'm
strictly against some stuff that comes from such "unification" projects.
But we should find ways and terms to avoid the mess that we get in. Some
of this, we can do by ourselves. Other things will surely have to be
presented at the original developers themselves and show that things
should change.
One thing that is quite irritating, is the fact that Qt is getting too
unilateral in terms of localization. For the last monthes, I have noted
that I can't print russian letters if X is not localized by itself. On
Gnome/Gtk progs I only need to set the keyboard. However Qt, first
demands the variable LANG in "ru" to show russian and modify such things
like fonts, And second it demands that all X should be in Russian to
type anything cyrillic.
Meanwhile I find an interesting and very funny thing on such a program
like Mozilla. To write in russian, I shouldn't set the "ru" locale. Or
else it starts printing in iso8859-1!!!!! So you may guess the mess that
was going here. A big main lib demands "ru" and a big main program
demands it out... While this is clearly a Mozilla bug (other gtk based
progs didn't seem to suffer from this), it is quite unpleasant to meet
and overcome them.
However, I cannot understand Qt and TrollTech. While it is good and
beautiful to have an unified system, I may get serious troubles. I need
Konqueror to read Russian and Licq to write in French or something
similar. It is a damn to try to guess umlauts and similar stuff among an
abracadabra of russian letters...
Yeah it seems KDE guys had overcome some of these drawbacks. But they
also added more wood to the fire. There and there, we see how all-mighty
Qt starts doing its dirty job if you don't have the locales "properly"
set. Meanwhile KDE, while being tremendously flexible in its settings,
suffers from some inflexibility to find proper fonts. I met an
interesting confusion of having two/three fonts still in iso8859-1 while
everything else was already living in KOI8-R. Besides, KDE still seems
to suffer some drawbacks from the fact that one may change the default
settings and choose other fonts. On trying to change locales on the
system, from time to time, KDE seems to loose a line and starts messing
fonts and codings. For example you choose Russian and change the fonts.
Now by some reason you try a look at German. And get back to Russian. In
certain cases this means a whole mess. You get lots of ???????????
instead of a properly set font.
Other problem is the existence of settings that clearly produce
confusion and problems. X is the living daylights of this problem. When
will anyone take the care of looking at 100 year old things? I mean
these mess of old fonts and aliases. "Type1" set of fonts create serious
problems on StarOffice. I had the whole fontset in shambles due to the
fact that they sometimes mess with newer Type1 you may install. I had
just this case. For some reason, I couln't load a new fontset, without
completely different names, while I had these old postscript fonts
geting loaded on xfs. Removed it and Hurrah! It worked
(@#@#$@#$%@#$#$$%!!!!!!)
And it is still an embroglio to agree ghostscript and some X apps to see
a common set of fonts. Yes, this is mostly a problem of those you
develop these apps. But without looking at them, no one can normal print
a damn page without thinking "it will come out or not?" There is even
the funny situation when StarOffice prints, Acrobat prints, tests print
but the damn Netscape says "oops", and spits the whole paper tray with a
:) in some pages...
Meanwhile, I wonder when we will see a normal chance to write an
semitic. Such languages like Arabic, Hebrew or Farsi are still badly
supported. And I am not talking about Mongolian. Those write letters
slightly similar to Arabic but vertically!
And when, in the end someone will care about these two thingies:
"variable" and "fixed". I mean the confusions they create by being in
"misc", "cyrillic" or somewhere else at the same time. This feature is
there HUNDREDS of years. Since old pre-distro times And till now I
haven't seen anyone who cared to select a proper alias for the proper
locale. You do everything by the book and "oops", terminals not in
Russian... You dig up, down and suddenly remember that same old "misc"
story... By some reason, either you reinstalled X (90% of the cases) or
something else, you get the happyness to see "fixed" hanging again in
misc/font.aliases...
And besides. This hard to read font configurations are a real pain.
Specially in cases when you need something out of the standard needs.
Once I got stucked in a situation where I had to remove a few fonts from
a whole set on the base of its properties and not its name. It took
half-hour to achieve this.
Another situation is the use of something like StarOffice. Yeah people
say it sucks. Frequently because they are not informed about a pair of
features of the system. One is that the thing was mostly made in a
iso8859 environment. And in Russia iso8559-5 is DEAD meat. No one uses
it. However it is possible to overcome this and other features. One
problem most face is document transfer. You write a doc, save it as
Word95 and send. Two days later your friend informs you he invited an
expert on egyptology to decipher the text... In fact the problem is
hidden on the fact that you didn't send things in windows-1251. Now,
StarOffice can do that job but it needs a propper set of fonts. To
install them, I cried loud the Hell. I had to scrap a few mandrake
settings that aliased things to M$-like fonts, later had to fight the
"Type1" bug. In the end, I set the fonts and everything went fine.
BTW. Most of this SO52 saga happened nearly 5 months ago. I had the
chance to install a prototype station for a small big company here. A
small office but with huge deals. And the huys were TIRED of M$
features, specially concerning security and in particular the financial
docs. So they decided to give a try to Linux. The prototype was ready in
a month and it goes nearly 3 monthes as they don't use Windows anymore.
Well, not quite so. They still use it. To play puzzles, Quake and
Civilization...
One thing to note: The hint on windows-1251 fonts & SO52 was given by
one Mandrake contributor in Russia... But he only hinted half of the job...
Well, to end. Right now we have a Russian localized system. However this
is not good. It's bad. Because other locales get stucked. Yes, I KNOW
that there is that .i18n file. But that means I shall build a whole
support for it. Note that I have more than 5000 users and it is not
pretty funny to dig in their home directories for a variety of reasons.
So right now things get stucked in /etc/sysconfig/i18n. Later I may
change this. Anyway this and other things. Many more than those above,
show that there are lots of TODO's in this front. Linux entered the
desktop world. The "not ready for the desktop" is a thing of the past.
But with such a linguistic mess, it will still be a weapon for advanced
and very patient users. And here we don't have solutions. We have only
bandages. You put one bandage here, another there, and another you leave
one for "just in case". Which turns into a wholescale mess in the end.
Specially if you are largely multilingual like me (I understand at least
six languages, speak four of them). And don't need a localized desktop
but a whole bunch of languages on it. And today, we are pretty aware
that in such places like Eastern Europe, you need, mostly, three
languages for technical/practical reasons: English, Russian and German
(no, I nearly don't know German but a lot here use it). Sometimes more,
as in Tatarstan. And most europeans need at least two. Most people need
english and their "locale". And this "locale" gets harder to implement
as far it goes from english and have not being supported. Till now I
haven't seen Hindi anywhere. And they are a billion!
So my conclusion. People, this language mess should get into an end. I'm
not saying that's Mandrake's fault. Absolutely not. With the exception
of one smart guy, they are great people and made "The Thing": Linux
Desktop Monster. A little bit more of salt and the pinguin will start
roaming over Redmond. But we cannot proceed without getting some order
in this linguistic chaos.
Ektanoor
